Dear E. O. Wilson: Please retire or stick to ants

Tonight I went to a talk at Seattle Town Hall by E. O. Wilson, one of the most famous evolutionary biologists still alive today. I admit I went for two different reasons. One, Wilson is super famous and also very old, and I wanted a chance to see him speak because another chance might not come. But two, I saw that the topic was how group selection shaped human evolution, and I wanted to see what controversial arguments he would make.

Controversial because Wilson has recently been stirring the pot by trumpeting group selection and saying kin selection has been debunked. I don’t want to rehash the whole event, but Carl Zimmer has a good summary in the New York Times. The basic thing you need to know is that most biologists consider group selection to only occur in very rare and specific circumstances, and that selection usually takes place at the level of the individual or the gene.

But you wouldn’t know that from the talk. Wilson asserted that his controversial Nature paper definitively overturned kin selection theory and that “no one” responded to his critique of kin selection. This set off a red flag in my head, because I definitely remembered reading criticism of the paper at least in the blogosphere. I grabbed my phone and instantly dug up this critique by Jerry Coyne and this one by Richard Dawkins.

Yeah, and he said “no one” responded. And it’s not just that Wilson is out of the loop – he came off as being purposefully disingenuous. Not only did he publish a response to the responses (Nowak, M., Tarnita, C., & Wilson, E. (2011). Nowak et al. reply Nature, 471 (7339) DOI: 10.1038/nature09836), but during the Q&A he changed his story and said that people did respond but they were 1. Wrong and 2. In the minority. Even though 1. He never explained why their critiques were incorrect and 2. The vast majority of biologists disagree with his views of group selection and the authors of the critiques weren’t random nobodies; they were very important and accomplished researchers.

I want to give Wilson the benefit of the doubt. Maybe when he said “no one responded” he meant “no one responded in a way that we think invalidates our hypothesis.” But even then, the rest of his talk was incredibly sloppy. He asserted that human eusociality evolved via group selection, but didn’t offer a shred of evidence the whole time. No proposed mechanism, no genetic evidence, nothing. He just waved the Wand of Group Selection and asserted it happened. He asserted that humans first ate cooked meat by scavenging carcasses from wildfires. That’s one hypothesis among many, but he presented it as a known truth and gave no evidence or citation for it. He asserted that eusociality only evolved recently but again gave absolutely no evidence as to why he thought so. I mean, maybe he’s right, but eusociality isn’t exactly something that fossilizes well, so it could have possibly existed in past species. At least put some sort of qualifier or explanation of your reasoning out there.

When someone in the Q&A asked him to explain why people disagree with group selection so much, he didn’t explain the objections or why he thinks kin selection was wrong. He instead stated that his paper was reviewed by a mathematician from Harvard and that it got into the prestigious journal Nature. Therefore it is right, or something. Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Your paper got published in Nature because you’re insanely famous and it was incredibly controversial, which Nature eats up. Nature is more about prestige and sexy topics than good science nowadays. Its retraction rate has increased ten fold in the last ten years when the number of papers published in all journals has only increased by 44%.

Look, I’m not a priori against group selection. Maybe Wilson is right and group selection is applicable in more situations that we currently think. But I’m not going to accept it until he presents compelling evidence, which he utterly failed to do. You can’t just say “Harvard” and “Nature” and leave it at that.

The most irritating thing about the night was that this was a talk given to an educated general public. These people are smart enough to appreciate science and know Wilson is a famous scientist, so they’re going to believe whatever he says. On the way out people were raving about how interesting the talk was. But he presented none of the controversy, no evidence, no reasoning, no citations, no qualifiers…nothing. I understand that a talk to the general public isn’t going to get into extreme detail, but asserting your incredibly controversial ideas as scientific fact is incredibly dangerous. This talk reminded me more of stuff I’ve seen from creationists and climate denialists than scientists.

Honestly, I left feeling bad for him. E. O. Wilson made huge advances to evolutionary biology, sociobiology, and conservation. “Huge advances” is an understatement. But tonight he went outside his expertise and left science behind, and it was kind of embarrassing. I would have loved for him to give an hour long talk about ants instead.

No, his novel is the key to his depraved Social Darwinist ant-myth about human nature. In his Social Dominance book he reigns it all back to seem more reasonable. -John

Adam Rutherford says:

Apr 22, 2012

Slur is a word meaning a disparaging comment. You wrote: ‘Nature is more about prestige and sexy topics than good science nowadays.’ So I’m not sure how that doesn’t qualify as a slur. As for ‘fabricate’, I explained in the responses that my intended meaning was as ‘create’, rather to invent with intended deceit. If that was not clear, I apologise, as I presume it was an error in comprehension.

My intention was not to create a fuss, nor to upset, merely to correct said error. If I have done Nature a diservice in doing so, then that is also unfortunate.

Richard, check out my blog response to Wilson’s book. By the way do you remember Chris Wilcox from Oxford days? He is my best friend in Washington – and I met out at the first HBES meeting, although I’m sure you don’t remember me. http://www.apesantsandancestors.com/

– John Wylie

Steven says:

Apr 22, 2012

You haven’t Adam. You have been quite congenial.

Midnight Rambler says:

Apr 22, 2012

Your assertion that ‘Nature is more about prestige and sexy topics than good science nowadays.’ is, I believe, an opinion that is demonstrably false.

Misquotes of the statistics aside, I’d say that this opinion is demonstrably true. The “reappearing phasmid wings” paper from a few years ago is another prime example.

BTW Jen, the post is still incorrect – it now says that Nature’s retractions have increased tenfold, while all papers increased 44%. The number of retractions in the original source refers to all journals as well.

Midnight Rambler says:

Apr 22, 2012

Kin selection seemed so compelling when I first read about the haploid-diploid case, but it sounds much less compelling with other eusocial species, particularly humans.

Humans are not eusocial, full stop. Also, there are very, very few examples of eusocial organisms outside of haplodiploid Hymenoptera (and only a few independent origins at all outside of bees), which is part of the evidence for kin selection.

Ok, then that’s either another area where Wilson is stepping out of the mainstream, or at least an area where he wasn’t being very clear. He seemed to be at least implying eusociality in humans. The more I dig in to this, the easier it is getting to understand biologists frustration with Wilson’s current behavior. I could understand questioning some of the assumptions of mainstream theories in search of new insights, but Wilson is acting as if previous theories just got run over by a bus and there is no need to even bother questioning them anymore. Very strange.

A hive of bees is not the same sort of beast as a group of frogs. In some ways a hive behaves as a single creature, with disjointed cells.

What is happening with bees is not really group evolution even though it involves the fate of groups of bees. It is about the genetics of the queen. The rest of the hive could be thought of as auxilliary cells.

This fight might be resolved by careful vocabulary.

B Taylor says:

Apr 23, 2012

I have similar feelings of embarrassment when I see Richard Dawkins Inc. holding forth on religion and theology, areas he knows very little about. There’s a lot to be said for sticking to one’s field…

What’s with the agist title of this post? It’s a turn-off, and distracts from the excellent content.

An analogous blog post substituting gender, race, etc. for age [i.e. “Dear Jen McCreight: Please go back to the kitchen or stick to genetics”], would generate a major s**t-storm. The aged are no more deserving of dismissal or derision for that characteristic than other marginalized groups.

Caroline Packard says:

Apr 24, 2012

The mathematical biologist Martin Nowak has a new book providing a new mathematical formula defining the conditions under which group selection could have led to selection for human cooperation in groups. He contends that these conditions could easily have existed in the environment in which we evolved, and that previous mathematical “proofs” that group selection can’t work make unnecessarily constrained assumptions.

Would one of you commenters who have said here that group selection can’t mathematically have been a significant selective force, and who is familiar with Nowak’s newly published thesis, please explain how his thesis is flawed? (If I remember correctly, Nowak is at Harvard or MIT, and he gave a recent video talk that’s posted on the Edge website.)

Thanks for any kind help.

rickschauer says:

Apr 24, 2012

Wowser, am I glad I stumbled in here today as I’m on p.91 of Wilson’s new book, The Social Conquest of Earth. And now, I have some additional views/topics to ponder as I continue my read plus some solid links to the controversies he’s created.

I truly didn’t know this book had opened Pandoras Box. Thanks all for the astute comments.

As a sidebar, I’ve always liked Wilson and think it’s too bad he’s going out with controversy instead of his usual aplomb.

Adam Rutherford, I think your original post was ENTIRELY fair and reasonable, absolutely NO NEED to apologize for anything you said there.

BensonBear says:

May 21, 2012

“Misquotes” of the statistics? When the statistics are incorrectly used as part of an argument, that is more than just “misquoting” them!

BensonBear says:

May 21, 2012

The comparison is not apt. The difference is that (1) the aged are ALL of us (G-d willing) at some point or other and (2) it is well known that there is a tendency for people’s cognitive powers to decay toward the end of their life. (Still may not justify the remarks against Wilson in this case)

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